Images of the East in the Nineteenth Century

Introduction Perception plays an important role in the foreign policy-making process. The majority of British foreign policy-makers in the nineteenth century assumed that the Ottomans were decadent, inefficient infidels. This affected their decisions relative to Britain’s Near Eastern policy.

Orientalism In 1978, Edward Said used the term ‘Orientalism’ to describe a tradition, both artistic and academic, of hostile and deprecatory, possibly predatory, views of the East by the West. His central premise was that Western knowledge about the East is generated not by facts, but through imagined constructs that see all Eastern societies as fundamentally similar and fundamentally different from the West. The West had a specific image of the East; it did not want to re-think its stereotypes.

Jean Leon Gerome The Said school has used the paintings of French orientalist painter, Jean Leon Gerome ( ), to support its case. For the Westerner, the Orient represented a not-very- respectable niche.

Harem Pool

Except for eunuchs, men were not allowed into the harem (seraglio). Gerome never visited one. The harem fascinated and inflamed the male imagination in the nineteenth century. Gerome used his imagination to portray the seraglio. No one in the East could question his interpretation. To Western men, this was soft-core pornography, but it was legitimate and respectable because it was a depiction of the erotic East. This painting gives the historian, therefore, a fix on the Western imagination, not a true representation of the Sultan’s private quarters.

Remember, religion had made a big comeback in the 1830s in Britain (Evangelical Christianity, St. Augustus’ notion of Original Sin, Eve, naughty women and sex!) The result was a nation repressed sexually. Orientalist paintings were an outlet since respectable Christian men, like William Gladstone for example, could study them in detail and conclude: ‘Isn’t it disgusting the way the infidel treats their women... I must have a closer look.’ Gerome was painting for his customers; this explains the expected orientalist tropes: architecture, shadowy figures, carpets, naked women, etc.

The Slave Market (1866)

This image is very stereotypical. The Arab men do not see the women as anything better than animals, to be bought and sold. It is a brutal painting filled with orientalist tropes. The women is small and passive. Why did Gerome not paint the male slaves bought and sold at the auction? Because this image fed into a preconceived notion. Paintings like this relied for effect upon the audience being able to read them.

But does it make more sense to read this painting with Romantic glasses rather than orientalist ones? The slave girl has no pubic hair. This was how classical painters portrayed women. Gerome was also a Romantic. Was he really mentally colonizing the East with this image?

Call to Prayer

Prayer on the Housetops

The Whirling Dervishes

These paintings are all very ‘Arabian Nights’, but do they denigrate Islam? This is Edward Said’s claim. There is certainly a timelessness to these images; a spiritual, peaceful calmness. Romantic artists in the West preferred not to paint the smog, squalor and poverty of industrial London, Paris or Manchester. They preferred to imagine the ‘timeless East’. Blake, Byron and Shelley had all criticised modernity, and portrayed the romaniticized East as an escape from the modern West.

Said argued that the modernized West denigrated the East in art as a prelude to colonizing it. But his late twentieth century value system implicitly accepted that modernity was better than antiquity. But Western Romantics valued antiquity; they saw the East as a more secure society. Aristocrats in the West shared this view, and so bought ‘orientalist’ paintings that portrayed a world without a rising middle class, a world increasingly dominated by ghastly men with Northern accents who had made their money and power through modernity.